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"The Unremembered Realms"? Really? There's lazy and then there's whatever this is. Anyway I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure that "humor" is the relevant thing for a parody defense - I thought it was more about commentary on the thing being parodied rather than whether the humor works or is...

I mean, this is not really different from the D&D Starter Set that is already on the shelves. I guess the difference might be that some parent buys it thinking it's a board game rather than an RPG and the kid doesn't know what they're getting, but to be fair stories like that happened back in...

I feel like this is a bit unfair because, sure, if you're weighing it in "Systems per pound" those four systems dominate the DriveThru RPG shelves. But - Modiphius has their 2d20 system, Renegade is putting out licensed work with their Essence20 system, Free League has their Year Zero system -...

It's impressive that Magpie was able to negotiate this. Part of it is just the power of the license and Target wanting to have more Avatar stuff on their shelves, but I don't recall Fantasy Flight ever managing to get any of the Star Wars starter boxes onto the shelves at Target. I hope this...

I'd argue the opposite - D&D didn't try to mimic epic fantasy, it created its own genre of fantasy which has merged in with epic fantasy over time. A lot of modern epic fantasy owes a debt to D&D rather than the other way around due to how hard TSR pushed the genre books in the late 80s and...

The original name (Homecoming) is even kind of strange except in a meta sense. I mean, he does go to the Homecoming dance in it but that's kind of not really the focus of the movie at all so it's a weird thing to name the movie independent of the meta part. (The meta sense, of course, being that...

Heh - I actually prefer dialogue that sounds like dialogue instead of "real speech" in my action movies. The more "real" they try to make it, the more fake it sounds to me. If they're leaning into the heightened reality on the dialogue side it makes it easier on my suspension of disbelief when...

If Warners haven't sequestered them away to a secret Caribbean resort where they're going to keep them locked up until two weeks after the movie premiere, Warners is doing it wrong.

Good is of course subjective. I'm sure it won't be up to Martin Scorsese's standards for example. But it looks fun and the studio isn't trying to hide from it. Those are good signs to me. It's an ensemble adventure movie which I'm already a sucker for - so if it's even half as fun as a...

Star Wars is exactly the example I cut for space :) Lucas in 1977 started Star Wars from Episode 4 instead of Episode 1 for a reason. In 1999 we saw why - starting that story in media res with the Empire at full power and the rebels at their lowest point was exciting - it was a tight, coherent...

First problem is making "prequels". Casual viewers are not as enamored of the "prequel" idea as fans, but fans also have their own vision in mind of "what came before" and if your prequel radically differs from that you're already off on the wrong foot. This was Amazon's biggest mistake IMO -...

I mean I personally think that Middle Earth's storytelling appeal is limited, but I don't think people are saying that there's no room for other stories. More that there's no room for stories that aren't from the mind of JRR Tolkien.

I get the joke, but truthfully nobody really is trying to make a game like D&D in other genres. D&D carved out it's own definition of fantasy, while other games try to replicate the genre they're modeling. I actually think that's one of the reasons why D&D is more successful than other games -...

A common refrain I hear a lot is people saying they like 4e as a game, they just hated it as D&D. If that's a true sentiment then there should be a market for it.

Sequel and prequels. Lord of the Rings Expanded Universe. Follow the exploits of King Aragorn in the Fourth Age. Witness the rise of yet another threat to the people of Middle Earth. Thrill as the wastrel grandson of Aragorn is forced to confront his legacy as he is tempted down the path of the...

And honestly it's fine. Some stories and characters just belong to different eras. They don't need to be IP factories that are perpetually turning out new product.

Guardians of the Galaxy was effectively a brand new property for everyone except for comic book readers though. It also was a relatively recent property as far as those things go - the modern Guardians of the Galaxy was an in-name-only reboot in 2006 that was updated then to be relevant to...

The difference between Batman and frankly almost any other character you can think of is that there have been "other media" adaptations of Batman every single decade since the 60s (or if I'm missing one from the 50s it would be since the 40s - I can't think of any 50s adaptations). Every...

I wonder what the median age of a syndicated newspaper comics reader is. Let alone Dick Tracy and other soap opera strips. I mean, I'm old and even I mostly keep a hand in the comics strips through the comics curmudgeon...

Yup - "OneD&D" is a branding exercise to keep people from calling it "sixth edition" as they do the playtests. But they're not going to publish it under the name One D&D, it'll just be Dungeons and Dragons and I bet that if they do put a number anywhere on the cover, it'll be "fifth revised"...